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I was helping my parents move, and rescued this magazine: Anyway, I fired up my phone scanner, and scanned the whole thing. I put it up on DropBox (85MB) if anyone's interested. It includes thrilling discussion about "C" becoming a fashionable language, and if 16 bits is actually better than 8. Also a goldmine of old technology ads, and some code snippets.
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Jan 15, 2015 03:29
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Thanks for uploading this, it's really interesting for someone who wasn't born in this era. I'm noticing some compilers for sale, like Ada, that go for like $400~500 dollars. Other than Basic that came bundled for some computers, did OS's or computers have any free options like the GNU compilers or did you have to work out how to write Opcodes? EDIT:  Ok, she either needs a better boob job or someone needs to stop feeling that guy up. Lord Windy fucked around with this message at 02:14 on Jan 16, 2015 |
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Jan 16, 2015 01:39
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Lord Windy posted:Other than Basic that came bundled for some computers, did OS's or computers have any free options like the GNU compilers or did you have to work out how to write Opcodes? It was (as I understand it) a strange time in Australia's computing history. Apple was the major player, but their prices were ridiculously inflated (surprise), so a whole bunch of apple clones popped up for a fraction of the price. One of the articles in there is talking about software licensing/copyright infringement. Apparently it was decided that object code wasn't copyrightable, which meant that machines that cloned the object code directly from Apple computers were legal. You'll see a number of these clones advertised in the magazine (like the CAT computer on page 70). It's interesting to see some of the same points of discussion (albeit in entirely different contexts) between then and now. e: on a side note, the magazine is also reviewing and advertising Comodore 64s of various models. Somewhere else that I shared the link to pointed to this: Comodore 64s still in commercial use in Brisbane, Australia (where I currently live). bobthecheese fucked around with this message at 12:44 on Jan 20, 2015 |
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Jan 20, 2015 12:41
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You're kidding, those tvs that show the bus times run on a C64? That is awesome. I wonder how they get new ones.
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Jan 22, 2015 02:07
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Lord Windy posted:I wonder how they get new ones. Maybe they never had to.
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Jan 22, 2015 15:15
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I also live in Brisbane. Those Commodore64 were replaced about few years ago. The new LCD panels display a modern app with the old colour palette, so as not to confuse commuters. I wonder where they all went...
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Jan 27, 2015 00:28
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Would have been around this time I got my first computer, a "Dick Smith Wizzard" This was basically a rebadged Creativision licenced by a well known Australian electronics chain (Like tandy) that had 4K, took cartriges and had this weird split keyboard/joystick thing with contact keys. It had a basic cartrige and could take a cassette drive and had basic Serial and Parallel port capacities. It was basically a piece of poo poo but its what I first learned to code on as kid. Eventually my parents brought me an Amstrad 6128 which was my first "real" computer. Good times. edit: Reading this, DSE had already released the "CAT" computer, which was somewhat after the Wizzard, and XPs are a thing. loving hell.... Though I guess I would have been about, uh, 10 at this point so I guess so. poo poo I'm getting old 
duck monster fucked around with this message at 05:06 on Jan 29, 2015 |
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Jan 29, 2015 04:55
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I wasn't born in this time so forgive me, but how did the Not-IBM machines stack up to IBM machines? The only things I have to go by are video game graphics and Mhz.
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Jan 29, 2015 11:20
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Lord Windy posted:I wasn't born in this time so forgive me, but how did the Not-IBM machines stack up to IBM machines? The only things I have to go by are video game graphics and Mhz. The PCs where undoubtably powerful machines by virtue of being 16 bits (And then later 32 bits with the 386), and where very expandable. Prior to the PC there where other bus systems, notably for CP/M based machines you had S100 bus but that never really penetrated the home market except for hobbyists. However the graphics just sucked balls. Early PCs where NOT designed for games, so you had to make do with CGA which had a grand total of 4 colors and black, and usually the worst colors ever, like pink, light blue, light green and white (There where a few paletes. One was yellow, green, red if I remember rights). So generally as a kid the novelty of "Whoah its a real adult computer" wore off when you realised the games sucked and the only sounds where nerve grating beeps. The two things that changed this was the EGA card which put it roughly on par with the C64s color wise (and later the VGA card which put it on par with the color macs and amigas), and the Sound Blaster card which combined a respectable FM synth capacity (Good enough for games of the era) and basic PCM wave playback for samples and speech. The Gravis Ultrasound was far superior, and in fact comparable with modern day sound cards (Possibly even better due to some really loving solid electronics and 32 channels of PCM audio. A friend in the mid 90s had a GUS in a rack he'd take on stage midi'd into a keyboard that together blew away AKAI samplers of the day), but it never really took off outside of musicians Whatever the case the EGA/VGA and SB/GUS combinations turned PCs into real games machines, but this was the 90s. In the 80s PCs sucked. But you could run your company off them, whereas a C64 wasn't really a good choice at all for serious business. When the 90s came about however the PC was ready to turn into the beasts we see today, and DOOM was the game that really showed what a PC could do. For relevance to coders. C64s/Amstrads/etc you where pretty limited to BASIC and Assembly, however the Assembly code was easy enough that a dedicated kid could learn it (I had an Amstrad and taught myself Z80 assembly as I was told this was the one-true-path to being a game coder). However PCs had a great range of languages available..... if you paid for them or pirated them. C64s etc DID actually have a range of languages available, but poo poo was pretty limited by the 64k of ram you had to play in. Turbo Pascal was the big one everyone learned at the time as it was basically C/C++ but forgiving enough for highschool kids to learn the basics of Structured and OOP coding (OOP came in TP4 or TP5 I think). Which paid off a decade later when Delphi became a thing (Delphi was essentially like C# with the graphical screen designer stuff, but with Object Pascal rather than C#. Object Pascal by that point had evolved into a pretty sweet language that ran fast as poo poo and had most of the same abstractions C++ had with less pointer headaches) duck monster fucked around with this message at 02:06 on Jan 30, 2015 |
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Jan 30, 2015 01:58
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Lord Windy posted:Thanks for uploading this, it's really interesting for someone who wasn't born in this era. I grew up around computers (in the US) from the early '80s and there weren't really any free compilers period until gcc (which was released in 1987 and took a few years to really get popular). On 8-bit (6502 based) computers like the Atari 800 / C64 / Apple ][ series, sometimes you got a "monitor" mode that was basically a hex editor where you could directly enter opcodes, but it was more common to write BASIC wrapper code to load the opcodes into memory. In those days, any other kind of programming tool (even a proper assembler) was moderately expensive. Really, until Linux and FreeBSD took off in the mid '90s, it was pretty unheard of to get any kind of quality mature software for free.
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Feb 3, 2015 01:50
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I actually remember in high school our teacher distributing copies of turbo pascal 3 to us kids on the reasoning that since TP5 was out TP3 wasn't copyrighted anymore. Which was totally bullshit , though retrospectively ironic, since i nearly got expelled for being part of a group of students who where using a disasembler cartrige to crack copy protection on C64 games (We found a tutorial in a games magazine that pretty much nailed it every time. The trick was to look for the 'illegal copy' message in memory and work backwards from there, and , uh, we sold them to other kids (I know, I know, hey it was the 80s!) for $5 a disk filled with games. We even made a catalogue which was ultimately our downfall. They even called the cops who basically went "Huh? Is that supposed to be illegal? Weird" We called our selves "Shonk-ware" , named after my grandfathers admonishment that what I was doing was "shonky". If we had known about the "demo scene" we probably would have done that instead buuuuut Australia was pretty isolated in the 80s, which is probably why our asses didn't end up in juvenile court for it. duck monster fucked around with this message at 13:27 on Feb 4, 2015 |
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Feb 4, 2015 13:25
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